Thrice-illumined

 

Western Norway has been a grey castle this June, with mist and grey clouds being constant features throughout almost every day, and also bringing with them torrential showers or milder but more continuous drizzle. As summer arrives, I seek the balcony at the back of my paternal grandparents' house, enjoying its shade until the sun floats into view in the early afternoo, thereby making the place too hot for either work or leisure. This year, however, the rain and cold have induced me to use the porch at the front of the house as a temporary work space. I have done so in previous years, too, but lacking access to the balcony has meant that I have sought porch much more frequently, especially because the dark evenings have provided a good excuse to light the three-pronged candlestick which I keep there. 

Last night, there suddenly broke through a piercing silvery light from the moon as it was climbing the mountain range on the western side of the fjord of my native village, Hyen. This sudden illumination was a drastic change to the heavier light that had preceded it, and it caught my attention immediately. Looking out through the window on the side of the porch, I saw the light of the moon filtered by the clouds, powerful enough to be reflected in the creased surface of the lake behind the house, and I also noted that the window glass in turn reflected the flames of the three candles, as well as the reflection of of one them in the window glass on the front of the porch. It was a lovely moment that made me feel thrice-illumined, and it was a very atmospheric reminder of why I tend to sit in this little nook even when I need to wear a jacket and a blanket - these shifting skies mean that no two evenings are alike in this place. 

A new publication on local history

 

Two weeks ago, the households of my native village of Hyen received this booklet in their mailboxes. It is a publication that celebrates the 150th anniversary of the local church, which is one of the historical and cultural centrepoints of the village. Aside from its importance as a religious house and a landmark in the fjordscape, it also serves as a reminder of our identity as an oft-forgotten backwater that has to speak loudly for its rights. This new church was built in 1875 and consecrated the year after, which was the culmination of a political process that had gone on for decades. In the nineteenth century, Norwegian governments were very economically minded when it came to the care of rural parish churches. A demand that functioning churches had to accommodate a certain number of people led to the destruction of the vast majority of the country's medeival stave churches, most of which were small and dark. Similarly, a village like Hyen was considered too small to warrant its own church. While there was a church in the Middle Ages, it is likely to have been decommissioned after the Reformation, and in the period c.1600-1876, the villagers had to row to the next fjord in order to attend services. The story of the drawn-out effort to build a church in the village is emblematic of how small rural communities often have to spend much time and money to make themselves heard. 

I was asked to write a contribution to this booklet, and I was very happy to do so. Although the booklet is dedicated to the modern church, its long-gone medieval antecessor is none the less an important part of its story, so I wrote a three-page overview of what we know about the church and the village in the Middle Ages. 

Contributing to a volume like is one of the great joys of being a historian. While this is the kind of publication that yields zero points when it comes to those bibliographies that have to be submitted as part of applications for academic jobs, it is a text that is academically solid and that will be read by a much wider number of people than any of my professional articles. In terms of outreach, this little piece on local history might be something of the most important work I have ever done. 

Timeslips in the fjords

 

A couple of years ago, I read an interview with the British novelist Alan Garner, known for his novels blending reality and folklore. He described how he had been walking in the mountains and suddenly did not recognise his surroundings even though he was in a part of the mountains that he knew well. Some friends of his working on quantum mechanics had attributed this to a timeslip, a sudden travel in time. I remain sceptical of the possibility to traverse the unfolding of time, especially as a historian who will happily concede that history rhymes but that it never repeats and that it is inaccessible save by whatever vestiges survive the vicissitudes of time and chronological progress.  

I was reminded of this interview earlier this year, when I experienced a phenomenon that is in many ways similar to a timeslip, yet which works very differently. This happened late in the evening at the verge of early spring, when there was no snow in the lowlands yet a sere, crisp frost that reminded me that winter had not yet relinquished its claim to the land. I was walking the dog, and we were on our way back from the other side of the innermost bay in the fjord, where there is a shipwright that can be seen in the pictures below as a stretch of light on the right-hand side of the photographs. All of a sudden, I felt that time had blended into itself, and that the world I was walking through contained all times at once as preserved in glass. It was a strange feeling, but a comfortable one, and something I have felt several times before when walking in the fjords.  

This was not a timeslip in the strict sense, and it was more similar to a déjà vu in that I recognised this time as something familiar. However, it was not that I felt that I had experienced this moment before, but more that I experienced times that I knew from stories and photographs, times from before my own entrance on the earthly stage.  

My sensation was, of course, entirely in my head, and the experience itself was very much rooted in a historical moment. I was walking a road that had not been completed until sometime in the 1920s, covered in tarmac that had not been applied until decades later, and the constellation of lights from streetlamps and houses could only stem from the pattern of inhabited and functioning buildings in the year 2026. My timeslip was internal, as it were, and brought on partly by tiredness, but also partly by that strange blend of chronological conglomeration that is typical of the Norwegian fjords. While several buildings are new, and while roadworks, machines and infrastructure point squarely to the 2020s, and even though the centre of my native village is radically altered from its appearance in - say - 1926, there are also numerous reminders of past times: Some errant stones brought by the ice thousands of years ago that have not yet succumbed to the dynamite of construction workers, a few houses that were built in the 1920s, the church from 1875-76, and the mountains that have looked the same in living memory. When I grew up here in the fjords, I noticed this conglomeration in the houses in which I grew up and the houses that I visited. There were keepsakes, furniture, pictures, textiles, and other items that had been passed down through generations, and that bore the stamps of their respective historical periods. 

It is against this conglomeration I see the sensation I felt that cold evening on the verge of spring. Because I have inhabited a world comprised of remnants from earlier times, it is easy to feel as if I know those times. I do not - the smells, the sounds, the tastes of those years have never reached me, however much and however vividly they have been replicated in handed-down clothes, in my grandmother's cooking, or in the dialect of my grandmother's generation that is so distinct from that of my own - like a chronolect lost to the passage of time. I suspect that this feeling of familiarity surged into my head that evening because of the feeling of timelessness that comes with the seasons, the recognition that it is almost spring because it always feels this particular way when it is almost spring. In this way, chronological boundaries slipped away, even though I remained where and when I was. And this, I believe, is the way timeslips work in the fjords. 

On the eve of Saint Peter's Chair - a pattern breaking?

 

Five years ago, I was living in my native village and I wrote a blogpost on how the feast of Cathedra Petri, or Saint Peter's Chair, on February 22 was regarded as a seasonal turning point in Norway. This year, I am once again living in my native village, and just as I did five years ago, I have been noting how climate change causes the old patterns to break. These were the patterns that allowed for such seasonal rules of thumb, where the deviations from year to year were not sufficiently significant that the pattern could be said to be incorrect. This year, however, winter has been unusual in the fjords. For a month - from early January to mid-February - we had no precipitation. The absence of snow caused waterways to freeze and huge ice formations took shape along the roads, where roadwork had cut through subterranean trickles and exposed them to the cold air. 

Yesterday, on the eve of Saint Peter's Chair, my youngest sister, her dog, and a mutual friend went for a walk on the ice during two hours of waning light. Recently the weather had changed and we got a few days of snow, followed by a downpour which turned the ice atop the lakes into slush. So far, this was according to the old pattern. It was said that Saint Peter would cause lakes and harbours to thaw, and this belief was illustrated by the saying that he tossed warm stones into the water to unfreeze it. For this reason, both the date and Saint Peter himself were referred to as Per Varmestein, Peter Warmstone.  

Walking on the ice after such shifts in the weather proved to be an odd experience. Before the rain had set in, strong winds had blown the dry snow into small drifts, meaning that some parts of the ice were covered in snow - which then turned to slush - while other parts were uncovered, leaving the rainwater to freeze into a top layer of the already thick lake ice. Consequently, when we walked on the ice, the top layer cracked - either rapidly or in a slow-yielding motion like a fleshy membrane, depending on how cold that part of the lake was - and it did sometimes feel like we were constantly on the verge of falling into the water. Then we would occasionally drill a hole into the ice to measure the thickness of the old layer, and this proved invariably to be somewhere between 40 and 50 centimetres. For reference, ten centimetres of ice is usually sufficient for walking safely.  

What made the experience even more atmospheric was that in the three-day period before the rain set in, the snow had caught the tracks of crossing animals - mostly foxes - and the rain had essentially fossilised these proofs of lives otherwise unseen. At one point, we could even smell the rancid, sickly stench of a fox - they are in heat at the moment, as one of them loudly made clear a few days ago - and the world around us was closer. This is also part of the old pattern. 

Today, as I write this, on the feast of Saint Peter's Chair, the weather has again changed. The thaw and rain we were promised has turned into snow, and I have recently been shovelling the driveway in anticipation of much more to come during the night. As I was shovelling, I met a friend and neighbour, who is also a fellow medievalists, and she remarked that she had not been on the ice because according to the old runic calendars, this was not a day when you could expect to be saved from the water if you went onto it. Normally, I would agree, but yesterday's experience combined with the ongoing snowfall made me hesitate. It does not look like we are losing access to the ice just yet. The question is whether this is the pattern breaking in a rather unexpected way, or whether we are just within that margin of deviation which means that the old pattern is still in place.

Ephemeral records of history - an example from the fjords

'Lads,' he cried, 'there's spoor here;' 

- John Buchan, Prester John 

In the right perspective, all records of history are ephemeral. However, there are certain records that are hostage not only to the passing of time but to the passing of seasons, and this becomes particularly evident in winter when frost, snow and ice preserve certain records just long enough to create an illusion of permanence. In a landscape where most of history has gone unrecorded, the tracks of various animals that appear after a snowfall or right on the verge of thaw serve as good representatives of what passes as history in these parts. 

Earlier this week, I came across some striking examples of this kind of illusory permanence. In my native village of Hyen in the Western Norwegian fjords, there is a lake in the centre of the village which froze a few weeks ago, only to loose its grip on land during a sudden and intense thaw. The ice on the lake, however, remained solid despite being unmoored from the shore, and when a cold period came a week later, the lake once more became available for human exploration. In that middle period during the sudden thaw, the ice had been accessible to animals, and I happened upon the track of a fox who had crossed the lake while the surface of the ice was sufficiently permeable for the weight of a fox to leave imprints. When the ice is frozen solid, a fox leaves no track at all. Consequently, when the ice later became solid again, we can be certain that this fox, and probably some others, too, have moved back and forth from shore to shore, but without any witness to the event. This one journey by a fox, therefore, is our only solid proof that the foxes use the ice as a shortcut. Although this only proves what we already know, it is nonetheless a reminder of both how little we need to assess patterns, and also how much happens around us that leaves no trace in the visible record. As a historian, I find the reminder very welcome.    

Histories from home, part 6 - a quiet reminder

 

The centre of my native village, Hyen, is a hamlet called Straume. The name comes from “straum”, which is one of several words in Norwegian that mean “river” or “flow of water”, and refers to the short but salmon-rich river which flows past the farmstead which for a long time was the only settlement in the hamlet. The river in question is one of two rivers that separate the mainland from a small island, which is called “Straumsholmen”. “Holme” means small island, so the full name can be translated as “the small island by the river. In our time, this small island hosts the sole remaining shop of the village, the church, the school, the care home, the community hall, the gym, a football pitch, and a number of residential houses, including the one built by my paternal grandparents in the late 1940s.

 

At present, the residents of Straumsholmen are primarily middle class. No one on the island keeps animals any longer, and the old farmstead of Straume remains the sole farm in the area. This state of affairs, however, is a relatively recent shift, and the number of modern residential houses can make it difficult to grasp the slightly older history of this hamlet, a history in which wealth was divided among the farmers of Straume and the shopkeepers on the island. At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, a few smaller farmsteads were leased from the wealthy farm, and eventually, over the next few decades, the hamlet of Straume became the home of several families who came to buy the land on which they lived. These families belonged to a type of rural farmers called “husmenn”, literally “housemen”, whose relationship with the landlord could be similar to that of sharecroppers or crofters in the anglophone world. The term is difficult to translate, however, because the social context of the Western Norwegian fjords is rather different in its hierarchies and practices than rural England or Scotland. Moreover, the housemen of the fjords are often referred to as “bygselhusmenn”, with “bygsel” meaning the act of settling through clearing the ground and erecting buildings. These families had some livestock, a small patch of ground, and supplemented their income through work either for the landlord or in other ways. Fodder for the livestock was often collected by helping out at other farms, or a family could be allowed to harvest from part of someone else’s land. 

 

Although my description of this rural class is rather brief and superfluous, the main point is that these new settlements that emerged both on the island and on the mainland from around 1900 onwards were inhabited by people who were often poor, whose social power was often dependent on local village elites, and who lived a much more precarious life than most because they initially did not own the land on which they lived – in short, their livelihood could be taken from them in a heartbeat. 

Straumsholmen, seen from the bottom end of the fjord

Today, the village centre does not contain many traces of this social stratification and the harsh reality of everyday existence that presided over the housemen. However, during daily dogwalks I have come to realise that there is one part of the area which serves as a quiet yet forceful reminder of this aspect of our village’s past. The part in question is the other river which makes Straumsholmen an island. This is a small river which does not always run, of a type which in Norwegian is called “løk” (not to be confused with the word “lauk” which means “onion”, which is commonly also spelled the same way in modern writing). In our dialect, both the river and the surrounding area is called “Løkjen” in our local dialect, meaning simply “the small, trickling river”. This small river is crossed by two bridges, and at the point of the second crossing the river appears mainly like a heap of boulders left from the Ice Age, lying inconveniently at the junction of fresh water and the fjord. A few buildings are located nearby, such as a well-kept boathouse and the local care home.

 

When you stand on the bridge, however, you will see that there are some stones that have been placed there by human effort, and there is a dent in the shore with logs of sallow-wood placed breadthwise across the bottom. Slightly beyond that dent can be seen the foundations of a torn-down house, foundations made from coarsely cut stones, which have probably been collected after one of the many erratic boulders that once littered the island had been blown up. This little corner contains an important clue about the earlier social stratification of the village, and of the plight of the housemen. 

Løkjen

As can be seen in the pictures, the waterway is not very convenient. The pictures are taken on high tide, and it is possible to navigate a rowboat through some of the rocks and into the fjord. When the sea is ebbing, however, it soon becomes difficult to get through, so all passage has to be planned carefully or one is forced to get ashore elsewhere and wait until the tide returns. In this place, however, four families were given the right to keep their boats, one of which was my paternal grandparents.

 

The white boathouse on the left-hand side of the picture is still in use, and it is well-kept, belonging to a family that bought the property from the housemen who first leased it from the main farm. The foundation of rough stone on the other side of the river belongs to my family, and supported the boathouse which my grandfather used, and which my family dismantled in 2023 because it was on the brink of collapsing. One other family kept its boat on that stretch of land – although I do not know exactly where, as the shoreline was altered when the main road was upgraded some decades ago. Another family has the right to store boats on the other side of the boulders behind my grandparents’ boathouse, but no storage facility currently remains.

 

As might be clear from the photographs, this is not a good location for keeping boats, partly because of the lack of general space, and partly because of the difficult passage. Since the river carries so little water, those who are going on the fjord to fish or collect hay from the farms along the fjord are dependent on the movements of tide and ebb. This area was given to the housemen because the owners of the main farm were not interested in using it themselves, as they had access to the fjord elsewhere. Since housemen could not be choosers, they accepted the locations, and over the decades much effort was put into making it a useful and suitable working space. My grandparents’ boathouse was built in the 1950s, and it was still in use – although badly dilapidated – in the early 1990s. The white boathouse remains in use, but that use remains severely hampered by the erratic boulders left in the small river. 

The socioeconomic context in which these places for boat-keeping were established is now part of the ever-receding past. My family, for instance, has long since moved our boat for the fjord to a different place of anchorage, one independent of the tide, and so have most of the other families who once were housemen in the hamlet. This patch of the small river serves nonetheless to remind us – by its retained inaccessibility – of how social hierarchies were once much more severe, and how social class meant something different in the early twentieth century. This is part of my family’s history, and part of the histories of countless families in the western fjords, and we do well in not forgetting it. 

Beer and climate history - a brief case study from the Western Norwegian fjords

 

This week, my parents and I have been brewing the traditional Christmas ale. It is one of my favourite parts of the Christmas season, because it is the continuation of old, traditional knowledge passed down and adapted through the generations, and because the end result tastes great. In Norway, brewing ale for Christmas goes back to at least the twelfth century, and might have its origin in pre-Christian practices. The ale that we brew nowadays, however, has little in common with the medieval product, and although the practice itself is old, the methods, the equipment, and the ingredients that we use now are very different from what we should expect to find in medieval ale. In other words, although I appreciate that this annual tradition maintains a link with previous generations, I cherish our ale for what it is now, not as a replica of a medieval product.  

The first glass the day after the bottling

The brewing of beer takes place over several days. This year, we started on a Tuesday when I went gathering juniper twigs higher up in the valley where my ancestral farm is located. The juniper is the main flavouring agent, and this year I was fortunate to find green and fresh twigs with a lot of berries on them. These berries enhance the flavour, and are always sought-after when brewing. That same evening, my father began to boil the fifteen litres of water that we needed for this year's batch. The next day, I went to the farm and helped my parents mix the various ingredients together, making sure to add the yeast at exactly 32 degrees centigrade, and to pour the liquid of boiled juniper twigs through a sufficiently thick cloth that we might filter out the needles and other debris. 

The juniper twigs after the liquid has been poured into the barrel

Each year, we do things slightly differently than the year before - usually not by design, but because there are enough variables that we might change things up without being aware of it. For instance, I do not remember whether we poured the sugar in before the malt extract last year, like we did this year. These differences do not impact the ale in any noticeable manner, so we do not keep too strict a watch over the minor movements of the process. 

However, this year we did one thing differently, and that was my father starting the boiling of the water the day before the mixed the ingredients, so that it would cool down in time. Normally, the water would be boiled earlier the same day. The reason why he did things differently this year, was a stark reminder of how such minor occurrences as brewing a batch of Christmas ale can reflect much larger historical contexts. When I first started learning how to brew ale, we would place the keg of boiled water in a snowdrift outside and wait for the temperatures to get sufficiently low. As my father noted, "now we don't have snow anymore". This was in the sense that we now no longer have reliable, long-term, steady supplies of snow in December, due to the climate change and global warming. Decembers are rainy and wet, with infrequent bouts of snow that is typically washed away by subsequent squalls. The climate affects how we do things, and the traditional practice came to stand in sharp relief with the new realities in which that practice was maintained. We have to adapt and prepare things differently, because the climactic reality in which we live has changed dramatically from what previous generations were used to. In this way, climate history can also be understood through such common, minor things like brewing ale. 

The ale fermenting

Histories from home, part 5 - a transitory monument

 

Human history is difficult to preserve in the fjords. Most of the buildings constructed in the past were made of wood, and the stones of the foundations were often repurposed in new buildings once the main structure had fallen into disuse, disrepair, or been lost to fire or other disasters. There are few monuments to be found, and most remnants are scattered and overgrown, while some surviving relics stay put far longer than can be expected. Sometimes, moreover, you find examples of people leaning into the transitory nature of our efforts and make their marks in the landscape in the face of an overwhelming likelihood that what they build will be torn down within the year. This blogpost features one such example, namely a small cairn placed in a rather unlikely place. 

In my native village, Hyen, in the Western Norwegian fjords, we often find cairns in the mountains. These are long-surviving markers to guide shepherds or other travellers, and sometimes they are of more recent make, being erected for mountaineers and serving as a gathering point or a point of orientation. Some cairns, however, are made with a seeming desire to make a mark in the landscape, even in places where the landscape is too mutable to support any such long-term history. 

This summer, I found one such precariously positioned cairn in a scree in a promontory on the western side of the fjord of my village. The promontory is called "Bjønnasvøra" in the local dialect, which translates to "Bear gorge". The name is a testament to the bears that once roamed the mountainsides of the village before they were hunted into local extinciton about a century ago. Bjønnasvøra is one of the most mutable locations in the village, because the gorge that empties onto the promontory usually brings huge avalanches of snow into the landscape below. With the changing of the climate and the less snowy winters, the gorge often brings rockslides rather than avalanches due to flash floods. Every year, the first landing on this promontory is followed by a quick survey to see what has changed since last year. One of the most dramatic changes came in 2024, when rockslides caused the blocking of one of the two riverbeds on the promontory, meaning that the water pouring from the gorge was now redirected to the farther bay only. This situation was, in turn, altered sometime this year, when new rockslides enabled the hither riverbed to flow again.  

View from Bjønnasvøra towards the village centre

Bjønnasvøra, towards the eponymous gorge

It was in the ever-changing scree created by millennia of avalanches and rockslides that I came upon the aforementioned cairn. It was placed on a boulder which in turn was mostly drowned in smaller rocks, and consisted only of four large rocks stacked on top of one another. I do not know who erected it, but if they were locals they would be aware that the monument was bound to fall with the next major rockslide or avalanche. Yet I do understand the impulse of erecting such transitory monuments, and I have done similar things myself from time to time. Because such markers as this are made for one's own pleasure, practically in the face of the forces of change, just out of the curiosity to see whether it can survive, and with the ambition of making a mark on the landscape. This kind of structure, however, is a form of that ambition which has been channelled into a healthy impulse that does not destroy the landscape in the process, and which symbolises the inexorably transitory nature of history and human endeavour in the fjords. 

Knutsok - harvest season and the feast of Saint Knud Rex

 

Today is July 10, which is the feast-day of Saint Knud Rex, a Danish king who was killed in 1086. His cult was formally established in 1095 when his bones were translated to a new burial place after being tested in the fire. The feast of Saint Knud Rex was celebrated throughout medieval Denmark, and also reached Norway within a few decades. Although the cult of Saint Knud in medieval Norway is still insufficiently mapped, we know that the feast was important enough to be mentioned as a day of rest in the law of the Gulathing province - one of the four juridical units of twelfth-century Norway. This lawcode was written down around 1160 in the Norwegian vernacular, in which the feast of Saint Knud was known as 'knutsok', meaning 'knutsvaka' or 'the vigil of Knud'.  

July 10 was marked on late-medieval runic calendars with a rake or a scythe to signal the beginning of harvest season. This was when the Julian calendar was still in use, and so this date came slightly earlier in the agrarian cycle than it does today. Even so, the feast of Saint Knud continued to be a marker in the annual round also after the Danish-Norwegian Reformation of 1536/37. Well into the twentieth century, it was customary in my home village of Hyen that July 10 was the date when the cattle and the milkmaids moved to the summer farms - either on the day itself or the weekend nearest that date. (In some cases the milkmaids did not stay at the summer farm but only spent the nights and then returned tot he farms to participate in the harvest in the daytime.) While I never heard my grandparents talk about knutsok when growing up - as opposed to jonsok (Saint John's Eve) or pederstol (cathedra petri) - it is evident that the medieval practice of connecting harvest season with the feast of the saint-king was still alive several centuries after the formal introduction of Protestantism in Norway. 

In our time, the summer farm in my part of the village is mostly used as a recreational space. None of the byres that still stand are used for keeping animals, and the cattle are now mostly moving about freely in certain parts of the valley. The summer farm is a beloved space, and much of my childhood was spent here, learning about the natural cycle in this part of the village. Today, I went to the shieling that belongs to my family. I did this as an homage to the old ways, even though we only stay at the shieling for a few days at a time, and then only for the sheer pleasure of it. A few sheep were grazing in one of the nearby fields, and the scent of pines, ling and bog filled an air rich with moisture. It felt right to maintain this connection - however flimsy, tenuous and construed - with a tradition that is now lost to all but a vague collective memory deciphered by scholars, and it was a pleasant reminder that some things are worth doing if only symbolically. 

A ritual for fishing

 

Earlier this month, I went with my parents to set out fishing nets in a lake. This is an old practice, and a way by which we have harvested food for generations. There is a lot of skill involved, and as I am quite rusty I need to practice so that the mechanics of the various steps become engrained into my muscle memory. Several things can go wrong. For instance, it is important to start near land where the water is shallow, so that the fish is less likely to swim behind the end of the net. For the same reason, when the rower is moving the boat away from the shore, it is important to let the net slip off the hook swiftly and without too much tugging, lest the stone that weighs down the net in the shoremost end is dragged further away from land. 

Setting out fish nets is a practice that goes far back down the earlier generations, and this kind of continuity is part of what grounds me deeper in my native village. There is a timelessness to it, even though the nets we use today, as well as the boat, are both of a type that is decidedly modern, made with modern technology and from modern materials. In other words, fishing with nets is one of those things that remind us that we are always closer to the ways of the past than we are to the ways of an imagined, high-technological, techno-utopian future. 

We had five nets to set, and my father set the first one in a spot of his choosing. He stood in the aft end of the boat while my mother rowed, and he let the net slip off the hook with practiced ease. As the hook itself was the last part remaining, my father spat on it before sending it into the water. This is an old superstition meant to bring good luck, and people also do this with the fishing hook before casting it into a river or a lake.   

The next four nets were set by me while my mother rowed the boat straight ahead. As I am out of practice, I focused intensely on making sure that I didn't drag the net or the net didn't get caught in itself, as it sometimes does when it is a net that is old and frayed. But as the first of my four nets was about to leave my hand, I also leant forward and spat drily and unpreparedly on the hook before releasing it. I did the same with the other nets, and each time I felt an odd satisfaction. This is a ritual, a marking of a transition from one stage to the next, the releasing of the hook a liminal state, a threshold. As so many things in the current historical epoch is entangled in emptiness and destructive fantasies, this kind of ritual felt deeply satisfying, indeed wholesome, as it was an odd but harmless way to mark an important shift in the labour of the evening. I do not believe in such superstitions, but I do believe in the importance of rituals for human beings, however constructed they are. Some rituals are good to have, to retain, to construct, to invent, because these rituals are brief moments that ground us in reality and make us come closer to the interconnectedness of it all. 

I do not believe in such superstition. But the net that my father set was the one that caught the greatest haul.  

Reading-spots, part 6

 

In December, after the end of my most recent employment, I returned home to my native village of Hyen in the Western Norwegian fjords. Here, I spend as much time as I can tying up various loose ends, applying for jobs, and working on the several commitments I have made to friends and colleagues. Such transitions like this one are always difficult, always emotional, because they are final and irreversible, and they are always tinged with a series of annoying what-ifs. As I'm settling into a new rhythm, I also find myself seeking out some solutions I have tried out before. One of these is to use my late paternal grandfather's room as an office, which was how I organised my work back in 2021. I was then in a similar situation, although I still had some short-term employment, and to sit in this room again with a cup of coffee and a cup of tea makes the transition seem less dramatic - the irreversibility of turning a new page feels less dauting, simply because I have been here before.  

This early in the year, it is still too cold to spend long sessions in this room, but when I do the quietness of the walls and the view of the beloved fjord serve as a great framework for thinking and reading, and especially to try and forget about the world for long enough periods at a time.  

Eden in the Norwegian fjords

Yesterday, I wrote a blogpost on how medieval Christians in Europe connected themselves to the biblical past through typology. Typological thinking, however, is a phenomenon in many Christian cultures and periods, and today I was reminded of another case of Nordic biblical typology that is far removed from the twelfth-century baptismal font in Fiskbæk Church.  

I come from the small village of Hyen in the Western Norwegian fjords, and at the time of writing I am residing here while applying for jobs. Earlier today, I went for a walk which took me along part of the old main road which was used from time immemorial until the 1930s. In so doing, I passed an old stone which looks somewhat like a bed or a couch, which goes by the name of "Adam og Eva-steinen", the Adam and Eve stone. My paternal grandmother, born in 1912, told me about how she and her generation imagined that this was where Adam and Eve had their bed, and this idea was commonly shared at the time of her childhood. My grandmother also had an idea that I believe to be her own - at least based on how she told me about it when I was little - namely that the orchard of one of the farms in this part of the village was the Garden of Eden.  

My grandmother was born into a world of Lutheran piety, where the biblical frame of reference saturated a lot of popular culture as well as the schools and public gatherings. In this sense, Western Norway of the 1910s was quite similar to the Middle Ages, although the type of Christianity in those two eras were very different from one another. It was only natural that both children and adults would fuse their knowledge of the Bible and their immediate geographical horizon together in the way that led to the naming of the Adam and Eve stone. This case, then, points to how easily typological thinking can be infused into a cultural framework, and how human creativity can run with this kind of thinking and create very lovely and very endearing ideas.  

 

Histories from home, part 4 - an object lesson in wishful thinking

 

Yesterday, I went for a hike in an uninhabited and uninhabitable valley close to the family farm in my native village of Hyen in the Western Norwegian fjords. As far as we know, the valley - named Skordalen, or Cleft Valley - has never been settled by humans, and the main reason for this is the harsh winters that make it very difficult to travel in and out of the valley. Yet as most parts of my native village, this valley has been used by generations of farmers to collect fodder for the animals and food for themselves. Several generations ago, it was common to build various storage buildings throughout the non-arable parts of the village. In these buildings, fodder or turf was placed after it had been gathered, and in the winter, when the snow allowed for easier transport using sleds, the hay or the turf would be brought back to the farm. Each building had its particular use, and so a hay barn was placed in a different place, and also built differently, than a turf house. (Turf was used either for the roof or crumbled up and placed beneath the livestock in the byres to soak up the piss and shit, and to make them have a softer surface on which to lie.) 

Throughout my upbringing, my family has encountered the stone foundations of several such outdoor barns. These stones are all that is left, and can be sometimes difficult to recognise in a terrain already dotted with rocks that have either been left by the ice or a rockslide. Whenever I go hiking in this valley, I always keep a look out for traces that could point to a now-lost outdoor barn. Yesterday, I thought I found one - or rather, I thought I found two - but I also know from experience that I have been wrong about such assessments before. The case about which I am most convinced is pictured below, and I will eventually have to return in order to assess whether these stones are likely to have been moved about and placed against one another by human hands, or whether it is merely a matter of nature running its course. What always makes this a difficult question, is that the farmers would have used stones that were already lying close together, and so the subsequent natural processes will easily shift the stones to such a degree that they look as if they are naturally placed. In this particular case, as pictured below, further studies are required. 

Reading-spots, part 4

 

Whenever I am home in my native village, I make it my quest to find new spots in which to read. This quest also applies outside of my village, but since I have spent most of my life among the mountains of home, finding new locations in which I have not yet read requires a bit more effort than elsewhere. Today I was reminded of one of these new places which I discovered in 2021, a year when I spent eight consecutive months at home, and when I spent many lovely hours canoeing along the shore of the lake just behind the house after my paternal grandparents.  

The place in question is a short stretch of stony beach where the shore is sufficiently even and sufficiently low to allow for disembarkation, and where it is also possible to find a comfortable place to relax with a good book. As can be glimpsed from the pictures below, this particular location also has the added virtue of being difficult to see from a distance, as old hazel trees are bending in arches over the shoreline, effectively hiding it from view, and creating a kind of canopy under which it is possible to seek refuge from light drizzles. I brought with me a volume of poetry by one of my favourite poets, Maribel Andrés Llamero, to whose poems I had only been introduced earlier that year. This book, La lentitud del liberto, is full of beautiful, melancholic meditations, and was an excellent companion under the greenwood trees by the lake. 

Reading-spots, part 3

 
Nearing the end of my first week in Oslo after two months in the Western Norwegian fjords, I am reflecting on this summer's results in my ever-ongoing quest for finding new places in which to read, to find new reading-spots. While this quest is not limited to my home village of Hyen, it is perhaps especially here that my quest becomes increasingly challenging. Having lived there for the greater part of my life, and returning as often as time and work permit, there are fewer new reading-spots to be found for each passing year. However, as the Norwegian fjords are landscapes of great variety and with numerous nooks and crannies, there are still plenty of places left to find. In this blogpost, I will share one of these places, namely the mountain lake of Langevatnet, which literally translates as 'long lake'. 

Langevatnet is situated on a sort of plateau, although a very hollow plateau, which was carved by the ice millions of years ago. While well above the tree limit, it is not located at the top of the mountain, as the grey and snow-patched rock still rises and curves onwards above this plateau. Even so, it is a strenuous hike, and one that I have not undertaken since I was in my early twenties. Since I had not been there for several years, and since it was a place I came to love in my teens, this summer's hike was a kind of a pilgrimage. As a pilgrim, I was dressed in a hat and carried a stick, and I had brought with me a book of verses that means a lot to me.

When I came to the easternmost end of the lake, I camped in the meagre shadow of a large rock, which can be seen to the left in the picture above. The place afforded me a good shelf on which to sit, and a wonderful view of the lake as it stretched westward. Here, I sat down to read a poem by one of my all-time favourite poets, Raquel Lanseros. I had brought an edition of her collected poems which I had bought in Madrid earlier this year, and I read her poem 'Invocación', Invocation, which is one of my favourite poems, and one from which I find myself reciting whenever I come face to face with something lovely in nature. I selected this poem especially because it has a lot of emotional value for me, and it was one of the first poems I tried to translate from Spanish into Norwegian. (This translation can be found here.) Reading this poem was one of the crowning moments of joy on a trip so full of delight and happiness, and it imbued this reading-spot with a particularly strong sense of belonging.  

Similar blogposts: 

Reading-spots, part 1 

Reading-spots, part 2 

Briseld - the fires of Saint John's Eve, and a reflection on historical methodology

 
In Norway, Saint John's Eve, June 23, is the celebration of midsummer. The traditional name for this feast is 'jonsok', which is a contraction of 'jonsvaka', or John's wake, since this is the evening before the feast celebrating the birth of John the Baptist on June 24. This name points to the practice of keeping vigil during the night of important Christian feasts, usually in the hope that miracles would occur during the vigil. When we read medieval miracle accounts and catalogues, several of them recount how people were healed or had visions during the night hours. The night of a saint's feast was a mystical highpoint, both because of the expectation that miracles occurred in these hours, but also because this was when the clergy would celebrate the office of Matins, the most extensive performance of chants and readings in the course of the daily round of divine services. 

Midsummer traditions are often seen as forms of religious continuity, where pre-Christian traditions have been taken up in the Christian context and given new meaning. Such claims of continuity are often difficult to ascertain, partly because they often seem to stem from some kind of wishful thinking concerning the possibility of salvaging pre-Christian traditions. Interpreting these traditions as pagan survivals, or paganism pretending to be Christianity, is to underestimate the variety and complexity of Christian practice. Moreover, such interpretations tend to expect that the rules and norms of ecclesiastical ritual were the only forms of religious practice that was imagined in the Middle Ages, and that anything which deviated from these rules should not be labelled 'Christian'. To pursue such a line of thought is to accept the thinking of ecclesiastical leadership, those bishops, abbots and occasional parish priests who doggedly sought to ensure that their flocks kept to the straight and narrow path, and who saw deviation as a breach with orthodoxy. In other words, while we might encounter claims of pre-Christian continuity and pagan survivals in the writings of medieval churchmen, we tend to forget that these claims have a specific function for those ecclesiastics. This function is to signal the triumph of Christianity over paganism. The desire to write history as a narrative of progress and victory from the ecclesiastical point of view, means that stories of pagan survival has less to do with historical accuracy than with a particular view of teleological history. Such a narrative can be seen in the chapter on the feast of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist in Legenda Aurea, in which Jacobus de Voragine recounts that the bonfires of midsummer stem from a pre-Christian practice which served to keep away dragons. The smoke of the fires prevented dragons from ejaculating their sperm into wells, thereby poisoning the drinking water of the villages and farmsteads. While it is possible that such a practice has historical foundations, and while we should expect that Jacobus himself believed this practice to be a historical fact, we must remember that Jacobus wrote his collection of saints' legends in the 1260s, after more than a millennium of Christian history. Consequently, those so-called pre-Christian practices might just as well be early Christian practices replaced by more recent, or 'reformed', Christian practices.   

In more recently-Christianized parts of Latin Christendom, continuities in religious practice are more likely, but must therefore be approached with even more caution. This is especially the case in the Norse world, where there has long been a tendency to seek out pre-Christian practices in search for a so-called authentic Norse culture. This tendency is connected to the national romanticism and nationalism of the late nineteenth century, when the quest for the folk spirit of the Norse peoples was in vogue. 

Some aspects of the midsummer traditions of the Nordic countries do appear to have pre-Christian roots. The concept of the vigil, for instance, resembles the practice of 'uteseta' or 'out-sitting', which occurs in several Norse sagas written in the Christian period. This practice consisted of staying up at night to gain access to the secrets of the world, and to learn of hidden knowledge. The idea that nights, and especially nights imbued with extra holiness and mysticism like Saint John's Eve, were periods pregnant with revelations and visions has also continued in Norwegian folk tales, where we, for instance, learn that the animals gather at the night of July 29, the feast of Saint Olaf, to tell stories to each other. While we here might see Saint John's Wake as a pagan survival, we should nonetheless be cautious to suppose that Norse Christians themselves saw the vigil in this way, rather than as a way of petitioning Saint John the Baptist to intercede for them before the throne of God.   

Another aspect of the midsummer traditions that might at first seem like a pagan survival is the word 'briseld', which in my dialect is used about the bonfire itself. This version of the word is typical of Nordfjord, whereas the word is rendered as 'priseld' in Sunnfjord, which, as the name suggests, is the fjord south of Nordfjord. The word briseld can be translated as glimmering or shining fire. The prefix 'bris' appears in more well-known contexts such as 'brisingamen', the necklace worn by the goddess Frøya, which shone and glimmered with gold and jewels. It can be tempting to see the word briseld as a pagan survival, referencing some pre-Christian practice. However, we must also remember that although the Norse vernacular was the language of of the pre-Christian Nordic cultures, it was also the language of the Nordic medieval Christians, and the name itself can simply stem from a Christian context rather than anything older and pagan.  

The main point of these examples that I have listed here is that we must be cautious when interpreting traditions as survivals and continuities of something older. While we should expect that there is a lot of continuity in religious practice across the conversion from paganism to Christianity in several cultures, those aspects that are most typically taken as evidence for such continuity might easily be evidence of the opposite, or might at best echo a narrative that comes from a triumphalist Christian point of view. 

Histories from home, part 3 - an unassuming pile of stones

In the first blogpost of the series 'Histories from home', I showed pictures of a stone structure that served as a gate for directing stoats into a trap. That particular trap gate was a something I had known about for years, and something I had seen several times when walking in the area. Recently, however, I found another, similar, structure in a part of my village where I had never been before (yes, such places do exist in abundance, because the landscape here is full of nooks and crannies). 

The structure in question was somewhat different from the trap gate described in the other blogpost. First of all, the trap gate was located at the opening of a sort of cave made up of several rocks of various sizes that have been brought together by the ice and the effects of various avalanches and rockfalls in the distant past. Such caves are typical shelters for stoats and foxes, and were typical locations for the traps which people of the village - predominantly young men or boys - constructed in order to catch animals they could skin for their fur.   

What I found on my recent excursion, on the other hand, was not just a trap gate but the entire trap itself, a structure with four walls, and most likely a stone in the middle which would fall down and crush the stoat when the animal moved a stick which kept the stone precariously in place. Moreover, while the previous example was located at the entrance of a potential shelter, this trap was placed right next to the naked rock face of a cliff. The edge of this cliff was no doubt a typical thoroughfare of various animals, such as stoats and martens, since keeping the naked rock on one side would ensure that they were protected from enemies on that side, while also keeping them less visible to birds of prey from above. Placing a trap in the middle of such a thoroughfare, a trap which guided the animal into a crushing death, was a time-honoured strategy. 

 
When I first came upon this trap, it looked like an unassuming pile of stones. As I was walking a dog at the time, I might easily have walked past it without giving it a second look, being dragged on by an energetic beast eager to trace the scent of deer. However, being brought up in this village in the Western Norwegian fjords, where so much of the past is lost and survives predominantly in such unassuming piles of stones - humanmade piles of stones, that is - I have become more alert to stones that seem too unnatural, one way or the other. Because this is mainly how history comes down to us: stone structures hidden in the grass, covered by roots, camouflaged by nearby stones, their original shapes bent or distorted by the elements.

This trap in the middle of an animal thoroughfare is a remnant of a lost past, one in which trapping for pelts was done without the aid of pre-made traps, and served as a way for people to supplement their income in a way that is now only rarely practiced (and no longer necessarily as a way of earning much-needed money). In other words, this trap is a remnant of a by-gone era, and a reminder of a small but important aspect of the economy of the early twentieth century Norwegian rural districts. This unassuming pile of stones, therefore, tell us about a much wider historical picture, which is one of the reasons it is so rewarding coming across these structures in the wild.    

Reading-spots, part 2

 
In the previous blogpost, I began a new series of posts which consists of short presentations of spots where I have had memorable reading-experiences, or spots where reading has made that spot memorable. This blogpost is the second instalment in the series, and it continues from the first one, in that it records a reading-spot which I encountered during the quarantine in my native village of Hyen in June 2020. 

As I spent some time every day walking about in the landscape surrounding the cabin where I was staying during quarantine, and as I had no other immediate obligations that dictated the rhythm of my day, I decided to explore some parts of the area more thoroughly than I would do in ordinary circumstances. My family had told me about a cave - generously speaking, as it is more of an overhang - that had been carved out of the bedrock somewhere along the brook than ran close by the cabin. I went in search for this cave by following the brook on its meandering way, and I found a little nook, easily overlooked when passing by or when approaching from the wrong angle, which provided just enough shelter to merit the description. It was an open space more wide than it was deep, but which provided a small bed of medium-sized rocks and driftwood, large enough that I could lie down there and rest. It was not a particularly comfortable place, but the view, framed by the jutting rocks and the brookbed, was excellent, and the sound of running water made the experience even more atmospheric. Lying on this little spot of dry rock in the glorious summer day also made me more appreciative of the all the little details and signs of life that came into view from that angle: the rowan saplings that thrived through sheer endurance although they would never achieve the size or stature of rowan trees in less restricted locations, the ferns and flowers that seemed to thrive in the moist and dank atmosphere provided by the brook, and the great pine tree that had now become a dry, grey giant which had survived more winters than any human alive in the village. 

In this little cave-like hollow in the bedrock I read some poems by Raquel Lanseros, one of my all-time favourite poets, whose verses became something of a life-line for me in the darkest evenings of the pandemic. Her beautiful images and the sound her of poems became even more beautiful when read under that little overhang on a Norwegian summer's day.